Third: there was nothing to be gained by giving himself up. Nothing at all.
On the contrary, he thought in connection with this number three. Why compensate for a ruined life by sacrificing another one? His own.
As he thought along these lines he knew that at long last he was on the right track. At long last he recognized himself again. At long last. It was just a matter of being strong. Not weakening.
That was all there was to it.
He devoted the afternoon to practical matters.
Washed the car in the garage, both inside and out. No matter how carefully he scrutinized the right side of the front and wing of the car, he could find no trace of any damage or marks: he assumed he must have hit the boy quite low down — at about knee height, with the bumper most probably, just a glancing blow. It seemed — when he tried to relive the scene down in the wet ditch — it seemed that the fatal outcome of the accident was due to the boy’s hitting his head on the concrete culvert rather than contact with the car at road level. Which — in a rather strange, perverted way — made his guilt rather easier to accept. That’s how it felt, at least. That’s how he wanted it to feel.
Inside the car, on the driver’s seat, was just one cause for concern: a dark oval-shaped stain, about the size of an egg, on the extreme right-hand edge of the beige-coloured upholstery. He had good reason to assume it must be blood, and he spent half an hour trying to scrub it away. But in vain: the stain would not go away, it had evidently penetrated the cloth through and through, and he decided to buy a set of seat covers before too long. Not immediately, but after a week or so, when the outcry after the discovery of the body had begun to fade away.
There were quite a lot of other traces of the boy’s blood, on both the steering wheel and the gear lever, but it was no problem getting rid of them. As for the clothes he had been wearing the previous evening, he gathered them carefully together and burned them in the open fire in the living room, creating quite a lot of smoke. When he had finished, he was suddenly gripped by a moment of panic at the thought of somebody asking about them. But he calmed down quite quickly: it was of course highly unlikely that anybody would get onto his trail, or demand him to account for something so utterly trivial. A pair of ordinary corduroy trousers? An old jacket and a bluish-grey cotton shirt? He could have disposed of them in a thousand above-board ways — thrown them away, given them to a charity shop, all kinds of possibilities.
But most of all: nobody would get onto his trail.
Later in the afternoon, as dusk began to fall and it had started drizzling, he went to church. To the old Vrooms basilica a twenty-minute walk away from his home. Sat for half an hour in one of the side chancels, his hands clasped in prayer, and tried to open himself up to his inner voices — or to something more elevated — but nothing spoke to him, nothing made him feel uneasy.
When he left the deserted church, he realized how important it had been to make the visit, to take the trouble of sitting there in the chancel like that, with no specific intentions or aspirations. With no false pretences or motives.
Realized that it had been a sort of test, and that he had passed it.
It was remarkable, but the feeling was strong and unambivalent when he emerged from the dark building. Something similar to catharsis. On the way home he bought two evening papers: both had a picture of the boy on their front page. The same picture, in fact, but in different sizes: a boy smiling cheerfully with dimples, slightly slant-eyed, dark hair combed forward. No hood, no blood. He didn’t recognize him.
When he got home he read that the boy was Wim Felders, that he had celebrated his sixteenth birthday only a few days ago, and that he had been a pupil at Weger Grammar School.
Both newspapers were full of details, information and speculations, and the overall attitude that was perhaps summed up by the headline on page three of Den Poost:
HELP THE POLICE TO CATCH THE HIT-AND-RUN DRIVER!
There was also a lot written about possible consequences if the police succeeded in tracing the culprit. Two to three years’ imprisonment was by no means out of the question, it seemed.
He added in his alcohol consumption — which could no doubt be established by interviewing the restaurant staff — and increased the term to five or six years. At least. Drunken driving. Reckless driving and negligent homicide. Hit-and-run.
Five or six years under lock and key. What would be the point of that? Who would gain from such a development?
He flung the newspapers in the rubbish bin and took out the whisky bottle.
3
He dreamt about the boy for three nights in a row, then he vanished.
Just as he’d vanished from the newspapers, generally speaking. They wrote about Wim Felders on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, but when the new working week began on Monday, reporting was restricted to a note saying that the police still had no leads. No witnesses had turned up, and no technical proof had been ascertained — whatever that meant. The young boy had been killed by an unknown driver who had then fled the scene, assisted in his efforts to remain anonymous by the rain and the darkness. This had been known from the start, and was still known four days later.
He also went back to work on Monday. It felt like a relief, but also an escape route to more normal routines. Life was trundling on once more along the same old pathways — familiar and yet also remarkably alien — and during the course of the day he was surprised to find himself pondering on how frail the link was between the mundane and the horrific.
How frail, and how incredibly easy to break. That link.
After work he drove out to the supermarket in Lohr and bought some new seat covers for his car. He found a set almost immediately in more or less exactly the same shade as the existing upholstery on the seats, and when he eventually managed to work out how to fit them in the garage later that evening, he had the feeling that he was home and dry at last. The parenthesis was over and done with now. The parenthesis around nothing. He had put in place the final element of the safety strategies he had evolved after long and careful consideration. All steps had been taken, all traces erased, and he was somewhat surprised to note that it was still less than a week after the accident happened.
And there was nothing for the police to hit on and follow up. He hadn’t discovered the slightest thing to suggest that he ought to own up to what had happened during those fateful seconds on Thursday evening. Those horrific and increasingly unreal seconds that were rapidly hurtling away further and further into the darkness of the past.
He would pull through this. He took a deep breath and knew that he would pull through this.
To be sure, it had been claimed — both in some of the newspapers and in the television news broadcasts that he had happened to catch — that the police had certain leads that they were working on, but he realized that this was a lot of hot air. A heavy-handed attempt to give the impression that they knew more and were more competent than was really the case. As usual.
There had been no mention of a red Audi parked at the side of the road near the scene of the accident with its lights on. That is what he had been most afraid of: perhaps not that somebody would have noticed the colour or the make, never mind the registration number; but that they might have seen a vehicle parked there. Two cars had passed by while he was down in the ditch… or was it while he was still standing on the road? He couldn’t remember that any more. But in any case he recalled quite clearly seeing two cars and a scooter. The driver of the car coming from the opposite direction to where he was heading — from Boorkhejm or Linzhuisen — might even had taken his Audi for an oncoming vehicle, he reckoned; but the other two surely must have registered that the car was parked on the edge of the road with its lights on.
Or was that the kind of thing that people forget all about? Bits of memory dust that only remain in the brain for a few seconds or half a minute at most, then vanish without trace for ever? Hard to say, hard to know, but definitely a question that kept him awake at night. These presumptive, latent pieces of evidence.
On Thursday, after a few days of silence in the media and a week after the accident, an appeal was made by the boy’s family: his mother, father and a younger sister. They spoke on the television and the radio, and their
